I’m continuing down the road of adding Deploy to Heroku support to various apps, and using my site as a test case for IndieWeb stuff. I went down the rabbit hole today because infominer was looking at the Jekyll IndieWeb template, and I found @voxpelli’s WebMention’s server at voxpelli/webpage-webmentions.
I forked it bmann/webpage-webmentions and got Deploy to Heroku working by just adding an app.json.

I’m pretty lucky in my #eastvan neighbourhood to have great businesses close to home.
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Blot.im
https://blot.im/: "A blogging platform with no interface". Specifically, it uses your own Dropbox account to create the files that it transforms into a blog for you. For $20 / year, this is pretty awesome.
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Stage 1 of pulled pork. Who says you can’t cook when business traveling?
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Grabbing a moment of peace in the crowded Blue Bottle. Working on telling the story of FISSION & collaborating with great people across the Ethereum ecosystem is a lot of work, but is keeping me energized.
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I was reminded today after speaking to Ted Leung that he uses the phrase “commons based peer production” rather than “open source”, because: The problem with the term open source is that everyone means something different when they use it. Some people just mean licensing. Some people think of a particular community’s set of practices. Others think that it means some kind of fuzzy democracy and mob rule. Which of course is exactly what I was trying to capture in my post from last year on Blockchain & Open Source Definitions. Researching that phrase further brought me to a bunch...

This started as a short reply to Erlend S. Heggen’s “The Fair Share Clause - A thought experiment for sustainable open source”, and got long enough that I really did want to capture it in its own blog post. Heggen @erlend_sh is a Community Advocate at Discourse, the open source forum software. The description of Discourse’s end of 2017 donations to open source projects they depend on is also a great read. Kyle Mitchell’s writing and his License Zero project are name checked, and I have posted about them briefly recently, but consider this another reminder that you should look...

As part of my dive back into open source, I took a look at my blog, social networks, and other tools I’m using. Well, maybe that’s not quite true. I’ve been tinkering with my blog for 16 years, I doubt I’ll ever stop, regardless of how I’m spending my time! Twitter all the things I’ve stopped using Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, and Instagram and doubled down on using Twitter for my “whole self”. Which in my case means posting cooking storms, long threads on travel, as well as lots and lots of tech. For this post I’m not going to get...

I got asked about my personal CRM post on LinkedIn: I stumbled across your blog today, specifically a post about choosing a personal CRM from 2016. As a fellow tool junkie it was really exciting to see the different options available at the time broken down that way. It also made me curious about your current workflow. Has anything changed? I’m always changing up tools that I use or trying to get better with the ones I keep using. A lot of it is based on a deeper understanding of how I work best, and the rest of it is...

Rather than treating attendees just as an audience for lectures, conferences should be a community gathering that invites people to make it an awesome experience. Here are some thoughts on how to include community in your traditional conference format, starting with a bit of history about unconferences.

The Narcissus is a little cafe at the north end of Commercial, across from our storage unit. Run by Japanese owners, they are doing “matured” fruit drinks, which sit in simple syrup & are then served as sodas or flavoured lattes.
@ The NarcissusPermalink

2017

Starting to think about food & cooking oriented projects for 2018. This is a spaetzle maker, for making German egg noodles. Could we build a kitchen library in Vancouver for sharing space & under-used tools? Tag something you might want to share with #vancouverkl
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This post was written as a response to Trent McConaghy’s post, Blockchain as a Field.
He starts with this statement:
“blockchain” is best used as a label for a field, just like “AI” is the label for the field of artificial intelligence.
It was Lisa Cheng1, who opened my eyes to the multiple definitions of blockchain.
Roughly paraphrased, here’s what Lisa used as a framework for defining blockchain:
Lisa is co-founder of Vanbex; I was an advisor & early investor there. ↩

2016

I’ve been once again looking for a personal CRM. Something that gets to do’s out of my inbox, collects data and messages on the people that I’m interacting with, and generally keeps me informed and up to date in my communications. Here’s a review of past tools and analysis of my choice.

2014

I’ve been asked by a number of people what I think the “tech platform” should be for parties running for the City of Vancouver’s November 2014 municipal election. I feel under-equipped to tease out the intricacies of economic and civic policy, so I can only speak to what I’ve observed, what my gut says. At the same time, I’m not sure what municipal-level policies can actually do for tech ecosystems, other than many of the things that anyone working in any industry wants from a livable, vibrant city. Can the City of Vancouver help with increasing the salaries that private...

We are always learning. Whether we search for the answer to a question we have or an error we’re having in a piece of code, that practice of what to search for and sifting through the results is learning. Some of the time the answer might be obvious, we solve our current problem and move on. Other times, we have to look in 2 or three different places, synthesize the answer, and apply it. What are you doing to capture that type of learning? How do you share it with others, including your future self? The above is the outline...

I’ve been asked by a number of design agencies, development shops, and other consultants how they can work with startups. Part of this is understanding what types of services startups need and what their budget is. The other part is these firms thinking of themselves as investors, and wanting to have a piece of a product company that may pay off beyond just hourly consulting fees. Much of the material is slanted towards design services, but is generally applicable to any service provider. Early stage tech startups don’t have a large budget for brand design, and since their customers and...

I’ve been in an introspective mood lately. It’s 2014, 10 year since I returned to Vancouver. 10 years of working with web technology and community building. What has changed about Vancouver, and where is it heading? How long does it take to level up a startup ecosystem?

You’ve got a freshly built OS X Mavericks 10.9 system and it’s time to start loading up the usual apps you use and setup your development environment. Luckily, there are lots of great developer tools for automating this task. I learned some new tricks (e.g. Homebrew Cask) from Tadej Murovec’s post. And, my Macbook Air is now 2 years old and all the command line tools / versions have changed, so I needed to re-document this for myself. App Store Your first stop is the App Store, where you can visit the Purchases tab and re-download items you’ve bought. You’re...

How much to raise and what stage your company is at is a constant question asked by founders and investors alike. Describing the stages of tech investing is my attempt to categorize what I am seeing in the market today. For any new business, traction will trump everything, with lots of customers using the product on a daily or monthly basis being a great indicator. There are many “it depends” for these stages and dollar amounts, and they also reflect common numbers in Vancouver / Canada. For example, a business model that focuses on Enterprise sales is going to need...

One of the many tricky things about building a web startup is that you can’t outsource product. As a web startup, your web or mobile app is your company, your sole purpose for existing. Why do you think you can outsource it? When you outsource building your product, your company is missing out on most of the important things that go into building a successful company. Sure, you can hire freelancers or a consulting shop to build you something. And that’s what you’ll get: something. As long as you keep paying the bills, the typical consulting shop will write code...

2013

Last Thursday, Jesse Heaslip wrote ‘Two Problems with (Vancouver’s tech community) and Three Ways to Fix it’. If you don’t know Jesse, know this: he’s crazy-irrational-passionate about the Vancouver tech community. For proof, I offer the fact that he organized 40 tech events that were attended by 1600 people in 2011. Talk about impact! Jesse lists the two problems as: 1. How do we get companies to the stage where there is interest from acquirers? and 2. How do we get those companies to stay? First of all, for a really great backgrounder on startups in Vancouver and the various...

I just saw this GrowLab post about an initiative to get local companies to get listed and link to a directory of Vancouver companies.
Now, I definitely think we can do more to celebrate being based here in Vancouver, as we digital creatives go out to sell to the entire world, but I hate seeing us once again starting yet another directory from scratch!

I had a brief clip air on Global TV BC this evening, commenting on the news that Facebook is opening a temporary office in Vancouver. Here’s a link to the written article. Thanks to Greg for tracking down the Global TV News Hour clip (starts at 15:20). I do think that the difficulty in getting a US Visa is a contributing factor to make Canada / Vancouver an attractive place to put an office. It was back in July 2007 that the Microsoft opening an office news broke. Looking back, the Microsoft office out in Richmond was basically a non-impact...

2012

Gowalla is like Lego used to be—it’s a tool without any rules.Travis Smith Inspired by Travis' post about How To Play Gowalla, I present you with my version for Instagram. What is Instagram? It’s an app for the iPhone that lets you apply effects to pictures you take and post them online. As well, it’s very easy to share those pictures on other social networks. For me, Instagram has become the most fun and engaging online community experience since I started using Flickr just as it was getting started. I think it’s no accident that both center around photos. So,...

It’s that time of year again, when I face the same question: my Flickr Pro subscription has expired, and I need to pay so that all my photos are accessible online. But maybe I should self host? Is paying for a Flickr Pro subscription still worth it? Don’t get me wrong - I think the “Flickr deal” is still fantastic: about $2 per month for unlimited storage of all my photos. From a pure storage perspective, even Amazon S3 would cost me more than that. Flickr was one of my first loves when it came to online community. When I...

I’ve been working with Contractually for the past 2 weeks1. I’ve always loved Martin’s vision for Contractually2 – both the concept of moving past “digital representations of paper” to more fluid, data-native documents, as well as modernization of the legal business. Broadly speaking, I’m doing Business Development. I’ve been trying the role title “growth hacker” on for size, but the phrase is a bit problematic. It has gone from a useful description for a role that understands digital tools & metrics and pairs them with more traditional marketing and business development straight to a buzz word akin to “social media...

I’m just getting back from 2 days in Seattle. In general, I’m trying to spend more time there, getting to know what’s happening in the Seattle community and seeing if Vancouver can connect more regularly (Cascadia!). Startup Riot is actually run by a team from Atlanta, with Sanjay Parekh playing the front man. The event is run as a pitch contest, including feedback from experienced entrepreneurs as judges, plus several keynote talks and lots of opportunity for connecting with other attendees. Here’s the description and agenda for the day. I loved the event. It was well run, it was curated1...

As I’m sitting here manually adding blocks of “break” time to my calendar around meetings I’ve booked, I’m getting a little frustrated.
I’ve used Tungle for several years now, and it’s quite a good tool. Rather than playing the are-you-free-on-Wednesday dance (or as I like to call it, “Calendar Tetris”) with multiple people, you can quickly find time when everyone is free to meet.

My friends at Common Craft have a book called The Art of Explanation coming out this fall, and it will include QR codes. In the book, there are multiple references to Common Craft videos, and Lee wanted to make it easy for people to go from reading a page in the book and then easily viewing the referenced video. These QR codes link to the explanation videos on their website. Since there is only one chance to get the codes right before they get printed, we talked about different ways to generate & track QR codes1. Short URLs and QR...

I gave a quick 10 minute lightning talk at the HTML5 Vancouver Meetup group about static site generators (SSGs). I ended up putting the presentation together using Hekyll, which is, itself, an SSG for making presentations using impress.js. impress.js is an HTML5-based clone of Prezi, the panning / zooming presentation app; I just opted for simple presentation mode. Check out the SSG Lightning Talk or view it in the iframe below (use arrow keys to advance). This presentation needs work (never mind the fact that using my new machine to do a presentation caused a bit of a fumble). I...

I attended day 1 of Northern Voice 2012, including Moose Camp, which is a block of time that is run unconference style. I hosted a discussion on the concept of web literacy. I went into the discussion thinking along the lines of being a web maker - being able to understand HTML and code. But as we tossed concepts back and forth, it’s clear that web literacy is a very broad term, and that there are different levels of literacy. I’ve added a link to this blog post on the Northern Voice wiki – please add your own notes and...

I had a great discussion yesterday where the phrase “the post I didn’t write” came up. This is a fantastic phrase, and led me down the route of examining why and when I don’t publish posts, and thinking about why others – especially in the context of working for an organization – don’t publish posts.

I used Storify to collect a number of the reactions that have been ricocheting around the web in response to Microsoft’s announcement of the all new Surface tablet. I am puzzled by their pre-announcement, happy to see more competition in this space, and really hope they succeed in shipping. Welcome to @Microsoft #Surface. Coming Soon. http://www.Surface.com https://pic.twitter.com/rLYDtge7 Windows It’s been fascinating to see the story of the “all new” Microsoft Surface evolve since yesterday afternoon. I posted a short link blog this morning. Boris Mann’s Link Blog Awesome. This is MSFT stepping up to the plate. There are many (many,...

If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long. Matt Mullenweg I had a great off-the-mic talk with Eric Woodward. We’re really aimed at the same thing, just that I try and encourage people in public and crush their dreams in private. Eric is right about fast follow / barrier to entry, but I think this tension of shipping quickly and iterating is still important. I remember a time when Leonard Brody suggested getting a bunch of engineers together in a room and coming out 18 months later. This was, of course, something like 5...

My first experience with node.js was following the ‘hello world’ tutorial on the front page, which I then extended to experiment with writing in Markdown and creating HTML pages on the fly. Not quite a static site generator, but a fun experiment in learning during the Mozilla Polyglot Hackathon. I’m currently using Octopress to power this site as well as bmannconsulting.com (see my migration write up), but one of the things I’d like is the ability to not have to have access to my dev environment in order to publish pages. That is, right now I can create/edit Markdown files...

In the past, the starter stack for web programming was LAMP. The ‘P’ originally stood for Perl, and then became mainly PHP. Today, with $5/month shared web hosting and thousands of PHP-based scripts & applications, this success is hard to argue with. But the truth is, managing even a shared hosting account is hard, never mind an entire VPS. You need to know the OS, the web server, the language, and the database. Revision control? Especially because of PHP’s ease of deployment and editing, revision control is an advanced topic. This leads to things like “just edit it on the...

Moving from services work to having a successful product is probably one of the hardest things to do. Well, perhaps no harder than doing any startup from scratch, but the benefit in doing it from a services company is that you have a built-in way to bootstrap yourself. As a single consultant or small development shop, you work for a number of clients on different projects. You might become known as an “X” shop, where X is some particular framework or programming language, being the go-to team when the complex or large projects come up. You get to learn about...

Allen Pike posts about how important homes for startups are and what his experience has been like here in Vancouver. Here’s the closing sentence:
Bringing startups close to one another is, dollar for dollar, more helpful to the Vancouver ecosystem than tax breaks ever could be.
Allen Pike, Homes for Vancouver Startups
Once again, I realize that my gut agrees with this 1000%, and it has for years.

Let me start by saying that it feels like we’re actually in a golden age of great online support & feedback tools. I’m sure there are more than the ones that I’m listing here. Also, at different times, I’ve recommended each of these tools for a specific purpose - many of them have broad feature sets. With that in mind, I recently did a mini-analysis of 5 different services that provide support & feedback functionality. I was analyzing from the perspective of a small company that is just starting out, for a mainly B2C product, with desired features covering both...

Brad Feld is finding a lot of noise in the system, saying he is noticing: …lots of drama that has nothing to do with innovation, creating great companies, or doing things that matter. I expect this noise will increase for a while as it always does whenever enthusiasm for startups and entrepreneurship increases. When that happens, I’ve learned that I need to go even deeper into the things I care about. Brad Feld What I'm Obsessed About At Work So, he identifies areas that he is obsessed about, and is going to dive deeper into them. It’s pretty easy to...

Brent Holliday writes about what is needed for BC’s technology industry to succeed, which is itself a follow on to Jevon’s StartupNorth post on Canada’s next 5 years. I have some further thoughts on the five areas that Brent discusses:

I’m the host at the iQmetrix offices today for the Open Data Hackathon put on by Jesse Heaslip and company. I’m also a judge at the endy of the day, so I’m mainly hacking on a few things of my own. Andrea Reimer helped pitch the city ideas at the beginning of the day, and will be a judge at the end of the day as well. One of the ideas contributed by the city was the concept of cataloging a neighbourhood's assets. That is, why do people love living in an area? Is it heritage homes, some cool retail...

Mitch Joel laments the ‘Death of the Unconference’, saying “This past month, I’ve seen a handful of events that are billing themselves as unconferences when, in reality, they’re just very shabby and cheap events.” I don’t doubt that the term unconference has been co-opted. But I disagree with Mitch’s take on what the one, true unconference actually is and means. Maybe we should backup at this point and actually explain the core concept of an unconference. An unconference typically starts the day by gathering all the participants in one room, and those that want to lead talks pitch their sessions....

2011

Sadly, no matter how much you might want it, you can’t will an innovative eco-system that generates new companies into existence, you have to let one grow. As Dave ten Have said recently, entrepreneurial activity doesn’t come from central planning. So, while it seems like a lot is being done, in my opinion at least, it is mostly splashing and thrashingand not much forward momentum for the people that all of this is supposed to be helping. via rowansimpson.com I agree with virtually everything stated in this article. Some particularly good parts to expand on: Both incubators and accelerators have good definitions....

This may be obvious to many nerds, but another huge advantage of running your own site, and choosing your own CMS carefully is how you can optimize for readability and page load performance. via zerodistraction.com Any platform you choose really only needs to support two things: Using your own domain name Ability to export I’m not too concerned about hosted platforms - fact is, they make it exponentially easier and faster for many more people to be publishing. (aside: you’re talking about choosing your own CMS and you’re using URLs that end in .html?) The concept of readability is interesting:...

Since mid-September, I’ve gone through several rapid changes in how I share links, how I blog about them, and how I tweet those links. In mid September I wired up If This Then That (IFTTT.com) to Twitter favorites and Google Reader shared items. At first I thought I’d push them here, to my Posterous-powered blog, but I would then never get around to expanding them. As well, the links were “lost” in the main body of the blog post. (aside: remember mid-September? Google Reader still had social waaaay back then) I went back and pretty much immediately rejigged things to...

I wrote a couple of weeks ago asking whether Google’s changes to Google Reader were going to destroy an entire ecosystem. Many others wrote articles about their usage of the Google Reader social features. From meetups to marriages, a whole world of stories were uncovered about the personal connections that people had made through Reader. I got emails and Twitter messages from a number of people in response to my own post. One of those messages lead to a meeting where many ideas were shared, and a desire to scratch our own itch. What if there was a Google Reader...

I am a voracious reader. When I am in “reading mode”, I can consume 3 books a week. I’m not reading that much right now, which means I “only” read about a book a week or so. When I first got my iPhone 4 (a little less than a year ago), I experimented with all the different ebook stores. Eventually, due mainly to availability, I settled on the Amazon Kindle store as the main place where I buy ebooks. I’ve bought a handful of 99¢ books as experiments. I find reading on my iPhone convenient: the Retina-quality screen, auto-dimming when...

That last one’s important. We’re not communists, we’re not anti-capitalists and we’re not running some kind of pep club. It’s just that we’ve thought about it. You cannot make a profit selling community. via williamtozier.com I saw this via Dave Pollard on G+ and nodded my head most violently as I read through the whole thing. (I could spend a week just posting each of the paragraphs of of Tozier’s post) Tozier starts by talking about how different labels / terminology start getting corrupted in a mass market to mean different things. It has happened to coworking, and it is...

In 2009, Portio Research counted the global value of ‘non messaging’ premium content (music, gaming, news, etc) downloaded or consumed on phones and sold to them worldwide, to be worth 85 Billion dollars. Yes, 250 times bigger opportunity for any content owner like say a Disney or TimeWarner or Turner etc to make money today, on ALL phones, not those few iPhones that are in pockets of some 4% of Americans and less than half of one percent of the rest of the world. Understand how enormous this number is. Just ‘premium’ mobile data income (I am excluding messaging) is bigger than ALL internet content...